How Your Mother Met Me

Hello my field daisies!

I am a huge How I Met Your Mother fan. HUGE. I’ve written a college essay on this show’s narrative complexity and now I am almost done watching the series for a SECOND time on Netflix.

So believe me when I tell you I was ecstatic when the 200th episode aired this past Monday and all the pieces of the story finally came together. If you haven’t ever seen any episodes of HIMYM, here is a quick run down.

How I Met Your Mother is a situation comedy about a man named Ted (Josh Radnor) telling his children the story of how he met their mother. There are never any scenes of Ted with his family; rather the whole show is flashbacks of his bachelor life in New York City with his friends, Marshall (Jason Segal), Lilly (Alyson Hannigan), Robin (Colbie Smulders) and Barney (Neil Patrick Harris). To lessen the confusion for the audience, the voice of older Ted is played by Bob Saget.

I think the reason why I love this show so much is because you never know what to expect. Since the story starts twenty years ago, voiceover Ted often forgets or changes details of the story. The premise of the show allows the writers to have complete artistic freedom to do whatever the hell they want.

To be fair, this show has gotten a little stale these past few seasons. The last good season was probably season 6. Season 7 and 8 was just a tad bit too slapstick and corny. There are a few good episodes in 7 and 8 though: Mystery vs History (s7,ep6), The Burning Beekeeper (s7ep15), The Final Page Part 2 (s8, ep12), The Ashtray (s8, ep17)… just to name a few.

Anyway there has been some controversy over the epicness of season 9, the last and final season. First off, the entire season is taking place over one weekend, Barney and Robin’s wedding. The whole season has to rely on flashback for content, which is just a struggle truth be told.

This 200th episode is said to be the best one of the season and I agree. But you can’t understand how great it is unless you understand all the inside jokes, so let me just clue you on exactly how many feels Carter Bays and Craig Thomas (the creators) packed into these 20 minutes.

The whole episode is a flashback starting at the very first episode, when Ted meets Robin for the first time and she throws a drink in his face to make her friend feel better. It is also the day Marshall proposes to Lily.

This is also the day that the mother (we don’t know her name yet) turns 21. It’s an unhappy day because her boyfriend, Max, died, leaving her with a ukulele and a broken heart.

Now we flash forward to 2007, when the audience gets their first clue as to who the mother is: her yellow umbrella:

Her friend convinces her to go out for St. Patrick’s Day, and they go to the same bar Ted and Barney go to. The mother ends up leaving early, despite the protest of her friend who says the love of her life might bump into someone else if she’s not there. Ironically he does, but don’t worry folks; she’s married.

The mother leaves her umbrella at the club, which Ted picks up later when he goes back to the club the next day to look for his phone.

Back in her apartment, the mother gets the moves put on her by a guy. The move is the Naked Man, the same move that Robin gets put on her in the next season.

The naked guy convinces the mother, she should chase her dreams, and since her dream is to end poverty, she decides to take economics. On Ted’s first day as a professor, he accidentally goes to the wrong room, the one the mother is in.

When Ted says this is Architecture 101, the mother freaks and leaves saying,”I’m in the wrong class!” It’s only when she sees Ted running by that she realizes she was in the right class.

Ted ends up dating the mother’s roommate, but they break up when Ted picks up everything belonging to the mother and saying how cool it all was. He always said his ideal girl played bass. Oops.

The mother ends up meeting a guy named Louis who helps her put her amp back in her van after a gig. Louis takes her to MacLaren’s, the pub that Ted and his friends are ALWAYS at. He mentions that he thought the pub was called Puzzles.

This goes back to season 4, when Barney and Ted come up with the brilliant idea to call a bar Puzzles.

This is like my favorite episode. You should watch it.

Anyway as the mother leaves the bar, she misses Ted by just a fraction of a second. Good thing too. She might be a little weirded out that he was in a green dress.

The mother isn’t really that into Louis until her friend convinces her she should give him a shot. Her friend talks about how she once knew someone who said he was a genie and his penis granted wishes.

Of course that someone was none other than Barney Stinson.

The mother ends up dating Louis, a great guy. But he wasn’t the one, and fate would make it so that she would finally find her soul mate.

Ted ends up running into Cindy, the mother’s old roommate who is now a happily married lesbian. He asks if she knows any good wedding bands, and that sends the mother to Barney and Robin’s wedding.

Now we are flashed forwarded into season 9, and we are given little recaps of scenes from season 9 such the mother talking to Lily about stealing her bandmate’s van and picking up the hitch hiker Marshall. We are also given a snippet of when the mother buys Ted a drink for his heroic deed of punching her obnoxious bandmate. But she tells Linus, the bartender, to give him the drink, so she never actually meets him.

When the mother gets back to Louis’s house in Farhampton, he is waiting for her, and he has a ring.

In these painstaking moments, the audience is left to wonder if she will say yes to Louis. Of course, we all know she ends up with Ted, but still. Proposals are heavy stuff. I feel bad for Louis. But hey, you should never ask unless you know for sure!

For a second we are left to believe the mother will say yes to him. She goes outside for a second to talk to Max, the boyfriend whose kept her from moving on to someone else. She asks for him to give her a sign that she can move on, and a gust of wind appears telling her yes.

But surprisingly, or well not surprisingly I guess she tells Louis no, and checks into the Farhampton.

She goes outside to the balcony of her room and sings an English rendition of La Vie en rose to herself, playing the ukulele Max gave her. It is hauntingly beautiful and the audience is shown clips of the Lily, Marshall, Barney and Ted. With her captivating voice as the background, we are left to wonder what will happen to the rest of the gang. Will Lily give into Marshall and let him become a judge? Or will Marshall give into Lily and they go to Italy for her to be a art consultant for the captain? And where the hell did Barney go? From the previews of next week’s episode, it looks like a strip club.

Whew. That was a lot to take in for one episode. I sort of wish they would have spaced out these moments, giving us the pieces one by one. But I guess it’s sort of the dilemma of if you want a dollar a day for 100 days or if you would rather just get the 100 dollars right then and there. 100 dollars immediately definitely feels better than a dollar a day.

Anyway I can’t wait for next week’s episode. On the other hand, I am also dreading it because that is one episode closer to the end of the greatest show on earth.

That’s it for today.

Love ya’ll and thanks for reading!

Hope you have a daisyish day!